Understanding Immune-etiology of Psoriasis: An autoimmune disease

Abstract

Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory autoimmune disease. Disease etiology is understood in terms of altered crosstalk between skin keratinocytes and immune cell infiltrates, specifically T cells leading to the development of characteristic psoriatic skin lesions. T cell alterations in skin lesions as well as in the peripheral blood of psoriatic patients have been shown to be associated with the disease condition. With a major research focus on keratinocyte abnormalities, more studies are required to understand the immune-etiology of disease. There are fewer reports with inconsistence findings on T cell changes in psoriatic patients. Towards this end, we performed a study using blood samples from psoriasis patients and healthy controls to access alterations in peripheral blood mononuclear cell and T cell count along with phenotyping of blood cells in terms of CD4+ Th and CD8+ Tc cells and expression pattern of T cell-associated cytokines in plasma samples. Furthermore, TREC analysis was done to understand possible origin of T cell alterations associated with psoriasis.